I was at San Diego Comicon for the first time this past summer. When I read that Robert Smigel was going to be there presenting material from the Best of TV Funhouse DVD, I wanted to meet up with him and say hi. I have met Smigel a couple of times in person before but not since our epic interview back in 2004. When I asked Smigel if he wanted to do another interview to promote this next DVD, he said What else is there to talk about? Well it turns out, a lot. We ended up speaking for over an hour. Besides dissecting some of my favorite cartoons we even got into some deep stuff about Smigels religious tendencies and his upcoming new sitcom on FOX.

Daniel Robert Epstein: Whose idea was it to have a special Saturday Night Live Best of TV Funhouse episode?

Robert Smigel: I dont really know who comes up with these wild ideas. It could be [Saturday Night Live creator] Lorne [Michaels] or the people at NBC. I just heard that they wanted to do one. They offered to do one back in 1999 for some reason. By then Id only had like three seasons worth of material and I think they were short of ideas. They didnt know what to air on Saturdays in primetime. So they aired the best of Jon Lovitzs characters and the best commercial parodies involving sports. They wanted me to do an hour and I declined at that time because I thought it would get boring. I thought I had blown it because they never offered it again but I guess they just ran out of people.

DRE: What about having Ace and Gary as the hosts?

RS: That was my idea. Once I get the opportunity I immediately think of ways to compensate for how boring it would be just to have it be whatever they intended. For example, they asked me to do commentary for the DVD and I just found it to be a horror show with just me talking about the stuff for 90 minutes, much like this interview will be. So its the most heavily produced, overly booked commentary track.

DRE: [laughs] What did the audience see when Ace and Gary were hosting?

RS: Obviously we couldnt have Ace and Gary really come out and perform a monologue for the audience. So first we animated everything and then we just played it in front of the audience. But for the monologue we did it live in front of the audience because we wanted their reaction shots. The audience looked at a blank stage but saw Ace and Gary on the monitor. Im just grateful that they laughed at all during that time because it was a very strange thing to watch. It was like the way those award shows are when they make Henry Winkler talk to Beavis and Butthead. It is always very painful because the cartoons come in like half a second late with dialogue. You know that the audience is watching Henry Winkler talk to nothing.

DRE: [laughs] Poor Henry Winkler.

RS: Well hes in high demand.

That was the worst joke I could have made. Henry Winkler hasnt been at an award show since 1983.

DRE: Is Jimmy Fallon ok with being lusted after by Ace and Gary?

RS: Hes fine with it. He has a good sense of humor about

DRE: About how handsome he is?

RS: [laughs] I think hes secure enough in his ability as a performer to be able to laugh at that side of it.

DRE: Whats interesting about the Mr. T parody is that most of the parodies you do are of shitty Hanna-Barbera cartoons from the 70s. But Mr. T was an 80s era cartoon.

RS: There are a few 80s cartoons that I took a perverse interest in and the Mr. T cartoon was one of them. I remember that I actively sought it out for typical comedy writer purposes, to laugh at it not with it. Generally Im not one of those comedy writers who invest lots of his time in that. I know a lot of writers who like to spend more time watching crappy things than good things because they just cant resist like the temptation to laugh and make jokes about it. A lot of sketch writers are addicted to Studio 60 right now. I saw an episode of Studio 60 and I got the idea. But there are other ones who just cant get enough of laughing about how little it has to do with working on an actual sketch comedy show.

DRE: Do you remember the episode of Studio 60 you saw?

RS: I saw the second one where they introduce the backwards clock, which I found funny. They were trying to have their cake and eat it too. They introduced the backwards clock as evidence that the previous producer had lost his mind but then I was told that in future episodes they continue using the backwards clock. Is that true?

DRE: Yeah it is true.

RS: So on the one hand its introduced as this ridiculous reflection of how seriously the guy took the show and then it ends up remaining in the show. As everyone has pointed out, how are you going to get people to care about a sketch comedy show the way they cared about the people in The West Wing cared about running the country. It cracks me up that he really felt the need to add a countdown clock to heighten the drama.

DRE: The clock seems to imply that the show within the show produces 52 episodes a year.

RS: Is that true?

DRE: Well they seem to stress over the show by looking at the clock but what happens when they are off the air for a few weeks?

RS: Well hes not there to watch the countdown clock. That would be like Lorne Michaels turning off all clocks on off weeks.

We were talking about watching something crappy. What was it?

DRE: Mr. T.

RS: Oh yeah, so I sought out the Mr. T one and I got the idea of doing this I need work premise.

DRE: I love that one so much.

RS: Oh thats my favorite cartoon. I told Mr. T that in the commentary track but he didnt believe me.

DRE: Everything is perfect about it.

RS: Yeah, I just love the idea that it sets you up to root for this guy that is doing something completely inappropriate. His motivations are so confusing and by the end of it hes trying to beat the crap out of the director. Then the kids yell that the director is still trying to get away and avoid having Mr. T beat him up even more.

DRE: [laughs] I love the line, Henrik Ibsen is a righteous dude. How was it having Mr. T in the booth for the audio commentary?

RS: He was great. Once you got him going he wouldnt stop. We watched the second Mr. T cartoon and the Christmas cartoon and were just talking and watching these cartoons and Mr. T just went off on unstoppable tangents. He could just speak nonstop at a rapid fire pace for literally 20 minutes in a row while I didnt say anything. So I just took a random chunk of it and made up a commentary track for the second Mr. T cartoon, so it has nothing to do with the cartoon itself, its just Mr. T going off.

DRE: Did he ask you to call him Mr. T or T?

RS: He didnt have any requirements. He has a lot to say about the legend around his name and how its very important that theres a dot after the Mr. and that theres no dot after the T because the phenomenon of the legend goes on ad infinitum. He was very complimentary about how I took the time to not put a period after the T. But I had only done it because thats the way Ive always seen it.

DRE: Im not going to go through every cartoon on the DVD but I am going to go through my favorites. My favorite cartoon youve ever done is probably Saddam and Osama.

RS: Thats certainly one of the best ones. One of the most popular and probably the funniest single scene on the DVD is the kids throwing rocks for the commercial. The live action was directed by Jim Signorelli and he perfectly captured a crappy kids commercial. Steven Gold sang the song but it was just a scratch track and he was going to make it more sophisticated. But I left it alone. That cartoon was done at the beginning of the Iraq War. I had done one that I had pulled a few weeks earlier, thats also on the DVD, that was mocking the whole shock and awe type thing, blowing up the whole country in order to liberate its people. I pulled that because once the war got started and Saddams statue fell, it was real, Rah, rah, rah over here. You want to do satire that reflects what some people are thinking, at least you do on a show like Saturday Night Live.

DRE: Whats amazing about Saddam and Osama is that you do it as if Hanna-Barbera actually teamed up with the Middle East because it seems very real.

RS: Theyre the heroes of our cartoon. What I love about the cartoon is that most of the time I cant really make a stand and I choose not to because Im not really smart. I can reflect what the overall public opinion is. I can comment if I think things are obviously strange like whether its the administration knowing about it or whether there is propaganda on both sides being spun about it. Thats where that cartoon worked because it was a parody about propaganda. I went out of my way to not to make it Al Jazeera because it is exaggerated how bad Al Jazeera is. Theyre not quite as bad as people make them out to be. I made it the state run Abu Dhabi. Whats enjoyable is that you can laugh at it from that perspective that peoples minds are being poisoned by bullshit on that side of the equation but if youre against the war and you hate the President you get to see him portrayed as a monkey who eats his own crap.

DRE: Well I call all my Jewish friends Yahoodi now.

RS: [laughs] We went through a lot of trouble making sure the Arabic was accurate too. Yes the sketch was mocking Arab propaganda but I didnt want it to mock anything else that had to do with the culture. So it would have been inappropriate for the Arabic to have been treated like it was gibberish or something. We had it translated very carefully and we got Arabic actors.

DRE: For another look at the Middle East theres another one of my favorite cartoons Shazzang. That one makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time.

RS: [laughs] That was my favorite in that season for sure. I defiantly put that into the DVD even though lots of people hated Shazzang.

DRE: Really, why did they hate it?

RS: You either get it or you dont. If you dont its just like, Oh gross! Hes cutting up a guy. It was the most graphic and disgusting cartoon Id ever done. But it was just all about somebody who was well-meaning going too far. I had that idea when I was doing the Comedy Central TV Funhouse show. On SNL I didnt really to parody cartoons so much. What was fresh about the whole gig to me was that I was making new characters or topical cartoons, which hadnt really been done. Then when I did TV Funhouse the series on Comedy Central suddenly we had to produce 80 eighty cartoons in ten shows and I had to widen the net a little bit. So I started looking at some cartoons with the idea of a parody now and then. So the Shazzan cartoon is very close to Shazzang. He really does toy with the bad guys a little bit but its just a couple of steps behind making him sadistic. Once I had that idea it just became a very fun game that Louis CK and Dino [Stamatopoulos] and I played just trying to think of the most awful and contrived means by which this genie could humiliate the bad guy always with a big smile on his face.

DRE: Dino and Louis are two of the sickest guys on earth too.

RS: Oh yeah. I couldnt have hired two better guys than those two. It wouldnt have been like that if I hadnt had the other guys in the room. But they took to the idea like flies to shit. People who like that cartoon, like you and I, know that its one of the best cartoons.

DRE: I played the Ladysmith Black Mambazo in Outer Space so much my wife told me I dont ever want to see this again.

RS: [laughs] Yeah, that was another idea I had back at the Comedy Central TV Funhouse gig. I was thinking about we should do parodies of these band shows and that was my favorite of those ideas. We did the Black Sabbath one. So we were going to do some Ladysmith in the second season. Then I dropped the idea after the show got canceled and sat on it until I had so few ideas for new ideas I went to my old list. On separate occasions I came up with the Ladysmith thing and the Token Black cartoon which was just ok. Token Black had been a full cartoon script that I wrote in 1997 but I just never gotten around to making it. Fortunately it was Black History month but by the time that I realized I could combine the ideas and use them as a setup for Ladysmith it was too late to produce the cartoon for Black History Month so we just made it a Belated Black History Moment.

DRE: The best things about those were the snickering cat in the Driving Miss Daisy one and in Ladysmith you had the little poppy alien thing.

RS: [laughs] Yeah. Well in Driving Miss Daisy she really did have a cat. So if they made a cartoon the cat would definitely have the famous Hanna-Barbera Mutley snicker.

DRE: Then you went back to making fun of Ladysmith by having Triumph singing with a fake version of them for the Night of Too Many Stars.

RS: Yeah, that was my own corporate synergy at work. Then I got to meet Ladysmith because I invited them to do commentary for my DVD.

DRE: So that was really them?

RS: Yeah, I just got into a sweet, simple conversation with them during their cartoon. Then I had them just watch some other cartoons and talk in Zulu. I also had them in the background when I was talking to Mr. T.

DRE: What did they think was going on?

RS: Theyre not clueless at all. They speak English. But do they have the same frame of reference as far as the proliferation of cartoons that took place in outer space in the 70s? No they dont. They probably didnt appreciate it on that level but they understood that it was a silly cartoon parody. They had their own objections that were tongue-in-cheek like We never run away from the aliens. We are Zulu. Zulu do not run away. But I had to have them behave exactly the way Josie and the Pussycats would have.

DRE: [laughs] You appeared on Conan OBrien as yourself to promote the special before it aired. Had you ever done that before?

RS: When the Comedy Central TV Funhouse show was on, I did Conan but that was more planned. This last time was a last minute thing. Conan made it very easy and I just tried to think of something funny to talk about. I had noticed in the process of screening all these cartoons and putting them together was how many cartoons had men in their underwear. In the first version of the running order that I had put together, in the first 12 cartoons, six of them had a man in their underwear. There was Barney Rubble and then Tom Brady, John McCain and then Tom Snyder who I ended up taking out of the show but hes in the DVD. Then Ariel Sharon was in the original Saddam and Osama script giving a blowjob to Dick Cheney.

DRE: Also Boo-Boo and Yogi Bear

RS: Yeah, thats right. They count as men to me. So all these characters in their underwear on top of Ace and Gary in their skin tight suits.

DRE: What else did you notice putting all the cartoons together?

RS: [laughs] That was the most singularly embarrassing redundancy. The obsession with male genitals or at least the way I leaned on them. Ive found it reminded me that there were, especially in the early years, times where I would throw in something crude just to make sure I would get a laugh in the cartoon. Like some of the X-Presidents were so dry on some level and I was competing with Chris Parnell who would be humping whoever the host was, it didnt matter if they were male or female. Somebody would be humped and it was an era where there was a lot of visual shock humor at SNL. They went to two guys kissing almost every week for a while there. It was really funny when Phil Hartman kissed Alec Baldwin in 1991 in a sketch. Now when you see two guys kissing on SNL its like Is this a rerun?

DRE: I think Fred Armisen kisses the most guys.

RS: I know, theyre still making Fred Armisen kiss people. But in fairness I made him kiss Will Forte on my charity show. But I figured, come on, its for charity. [laughs] I liked the setup for the joke; it was Mike Myers as the eccentric millionaire requesting that two men kiss. I had a motivation, not that Im seriously defending it [laughs].

DRE: In the commentary, you mention that one of the animators, David Wachtenheim is an Orthodox Jew. You also said that you are religious.

RS: Im not saying Im Orthodox. Im observant in that I keep a kosher home. I do go to synagogue sometimes especially on the high holidays though I used to go a lot more. Its too hard with the family nowadays for me to maintain that. But I was brought up with a fair amount of religion as a kid and theres a lot I like about religion. Its easy for religion to get perverted by opportunistic people and its easy for religion to be misdirected and used as a simplistic solution to peoples problems but theres also a lot of wisdom and logic in the Bible. Until I was ten I went to a school that taught Hebrew every day in the afternoon, not just on Sundays, so it didn't feel like it was extra work. I went to a synagogue where the rabbi would really explain the Torah portions in a way that sometimes I didnt necessarily agree with but I thought there was a lot of logic there. Theres a lot I dont know about other religions. I know theres a lot I like about Judaism, it feels like its rooted in humility in a lot of ways, at least the way I interpret it. Its easy to laugh at the logic like, do you seriously not eat pork because it caused trichinosis thousands of years ago? People dont eat pork because they worry about something that was a problem thousands of years ago. Its just something that you do as ritual.

DRE: Its just interesting because I know Stephen Colbert is a practicing Roman Catholic.

RS: Yeah, weve talked about religion in the past and hes definitely not Jewish.

DRE: [laughs] Well its just interesting to see people who satirize stuff as harshly as you guys do also be religious.

RS: Yeah, Steve satirizes religious propaganda all the time. But the bad and ironic thing about it is that those people who purport to be the standard bearers for religion divert peoples attention from whats actually good and useful about religion. People are shocked a lot of times when they hear that I actually have respect for a lot of the precepts of religion and particularly Judaism. I was lucky enough to have been brought up with it in a way where I really got to understand it from the inside out as opposed to the way many people are exposed to it today.

DRE: Yeah, I grew up kosher in my house. Thats why Im not kosher now.

RS: Why? Tell me about that.

DRE: It sounds like the education that you got was much better than mine. I had no Jewish education at home growing up. I went to Hebrew school and I went to conservative Jewish school but nothing was taught to me at home except for the fact that You cant bring that into the house. That was about it.

RS: With no explanation or anything.

DRE: Yeah, which made me go out and find out the explanations on my own. Which made me think, Well I dont know if I like that explanation that much.

RS: It has to be taught with affection and not fear motivated.

DRE: Yeah it cant be equated with a rule like a curfew. It cant be You have to come home at this time because I want you to. You cant bring that bacon in the house because I dont want you to. It has to be backed up with the idea of tradition more than, this is what I want. Tradition was never taught, we just followed the traditions.

RS: Thats important but it also helps if you understand the whole means of why certain meats are kosher and why certain meat isnt kosher. There are all the humane procedures that have been used for thousands of years to ensure that an animal is killed in the kindest way possible. You at least get to consider that there is a logic and a humility to it.

DRE: Just to get less serious here. When I saw the video for Eminems Ass Like That I didnt realize that was actually you doing Triumph in the video until Triumph fell down and I saw the back of your head.

RS: Oh yeah, just barely. I was very specific about that. There was a long series of negotiations about that whole video. I really like Eminem and I felt bad about what had happened. Then when he came out with that album I was shocked that he would name check Triumph, let alone do a whole song about him. But I guess he felt that even though it was two years later and everyone else in the world had moved on he felt the need to artistically address it. He did get a lot of bad press from what happened with Triumph. I actually thought the song was pretty good. I was grateful that he talked about Triumph and not Robert Smigel calling me a dick or a fag on a record. Its probably better not to be called fag on the most popular rappers CD. They called me up and said, Were doing a video and we want you in it. I was like, How am I going to say no to this guy? because I like him and also religion has taught me to feel guilt and take on responsibility for everyones pain. I also felt if I didnt do it they would create some awful looking puppet and do something very negative and derogatory so I felt like I better participate. There were negotiations. Originally he wanted me to be in the video. He wanted to see me very clearly holding Triumph and have Eminem beat the shit out of me. I insisted that it had to be a pile up and I didnt really want to be seen. Most people dont even know what the back of my head looks like.

DRE: Only people like me.

RS: I actually puppeteered Triumph because once I was there I figured I better take care of the quality control side of it because I didnt know how much exposure it was going to get. Little did I know that it would be a video that no one would like and it would disappear very quickly. I think that song just didnt connect with people. I thought it was a funny song and a good song but it didnt really connect to people. It certainly didnt top the one where he was in the Robin costume. One goofy video too many.

DRE: When did the Night of Too Many Stars become such a big deal?

RS: Well it was a different network doing it. When I was doing it with NBC, they were nice enough to do it. I think they committed to it and then they might have gotten a bit of cold feet with the concept once because I think if they felt that if they made a huge deal of it then every charity is going to be on their ass. Comedy Central just didnt have those concerns. Maybe they were just happy to have a show with Jon Stewart and the funniest people in the world. The lineup I ended up getting was beyond what I had expected. There were the people I contacted and then Jon was able to get people like Jerry Seinfeld to come in.

DRE: Brian Williams too.

RS: I dont know who got Brian Williams. I dont know who made that call.

DRE: That was a funny bit he did.

RS: That was a very funny bit. T. Sean Shannon came up with that idea and Brian Williams is always funny. Although the special didnt really get the promotion outside of the network that it probably should have had. I think the next time youll see something much bigger. I dont think people who didnt watch Comedy Central knew about it. It didnt get huge ratings though it made a lot of money. Comedy Central was very generous with letting me set up a celebrity phone bank. The phone bank alone made something in the area of $250,000 which was about five times what anyone had projected. Then Jon himself came up with this thing and appealed to people to stand up in the audience and support a public school program that was desperately needed. Some people stood up with $50,000 donations and then there were different levels. By the time they got to $1000 there were dozens of people standing up and it made something close to $300,000 for our charities within three minutes. So my wife and I were pretty overwhelmed. It made much more money than we had ever anticipated it would make. It made twice as much money as the first event.

DRE: Thats great.

RS: Its still making money because they will be rerunning it during Thanksgiving and Christmas. Also right now you can download it on iTunes and they give 100 percent of the $1.99 to the charity.

DRE: So tell me about your show Animals that youre working on.

RS: Its called The Animals and Greg Cohen and I are developing it. It is something Ive been thinking about for a long time. Pretty much since TV Funhouse fell apart. What was great about TV Funhouse is also what was unproduceable about it, the animals and puppets interacting. Thats one of those things that God doesnt want happening so he makes it very expensive to produce. Now I really do sound like a zealot. I made a huge effort to keep TV Funhouse on the air. It was going to be produced out of Canada. But it became impossible and at a certain point I started to think, You know, for all this work I just have to find another way to do animal humor thats easier and maybe try and make some more money doing it. It occurred to me that if I did a show about animals in animated form then it could also be interesting and racy the way Friends is. You dont necessarily have to see the animals having sex with each other, in a way I took so much delight with the Comedy Central show. Part of the appeal of what I do with Triumph and the reason I cant be completely dirty is because Im doing it on NBC. A lot of people like the stuff where it doesnt get super dirty more than the Triumph comedy album where Im uncensored and I can say anything I want. It is funny in that context but some people are just as satisfied or more satisfied with seeing me just go up to the line and not cross it on network television. I think that you can do spots that feel fairly outrageous and interesting with animals on a primetime sitcom.

DRE: So it is going to be like a sitcom, but will it have the short films?

RS: As of now thats not the plan. I cant perpetuate that. I would love to. Thats what was great about the Comedy Central show because I just wanted a home for everybody to write short form cartoons. This is taking what I was doing with the Anipals and converting it into something that I think could be interesting and appealing. It might not seem as random and motivated purely by shock value. In fairness we did write a second season of shows that I think were going to be a lot better, where the characters were going to be more developed and their motivations would be more apparent but we never got to do it. What Im looking to do here is, Im not going to say its like Desperate Housewives or something but it will be like a neighborhood of animals. Therell be extreme things that happen and it will parody human interaction.

DRE: Any talk about the Comedy Central TV Funhouse show coming to DVD?

RS: Yeah, that DVD is coming out, hopefully within a year. Its been held up for a lot of strange reasons. One of which was like they werent sure they could call it TV Funhouse. They didnt know what the rights were anymore because there was a big to do when I took that name. At the time I was able to do it because I was still on Saturday Night Live doing the cartoons and it was a way to keep me doing both. I got away with it so I guess its alright.